Loanwords in the world's languages: A comparative handbook (review)

Lay people's first and most instinctive association with language and linguistic diversity relates to vocabulary. Words are considered the quintessential feature of a language more so than 'accent' or grammar. A group of experts in linguistic typology setting out to produce a volume that might trigger some interest among a lay audience would therefore be best advised to focus on the lexicon. The question 'which of the words we use are more likely to have been taken over from another language?' is a winner. In the age of globalization, everyone is aware of loanwords, shared words, and universal words. Even purists have no choice but to acknowledge the presence of lexical borrowings.

At the same time, studying lexical borrowings is by no means a mere popularization of linguistic typology. The very foundations of the comparative method in linguistics rely on recognizing cognates between languages and so on the notion of the diachronic stability of at least some parts of the lexicon. The realization that some meanings prove more reliable for this exercise than others has brought forward the idea of a 'basic lexicon'. Some linguists rely heavily on this idea in making the case for historical-genetic relationships among languages. Yet the precise definition of 'basic lexicon' has always been somewhat impressionistic. The Swadesh (1950) list remains to this day the principal tool and standard measure of lexical and so of language-genetic relatedness among languages. As work with the list became more ambitious and scholars ventured into the field of 'lexico-statistics', claiming to be able to reconstruct the time depth of separation between related languages on the basis of their shared lexicon, the issue of lexical borrowing took on a center-stage position as a potentially disrupting factor (e.g. Swadesh 1952, Embleton 1986, Renfrew et al. 2000). Needless to say, doubts about the reliability of the Swadesh list as an effective tool remain, and they continue to prompt those specializing in this field to reexamine the tool (see e.g. Starostin 2010). In this respect, the volume under review is a major empirical and theoretical breakthrough. For the very first time it approaches the issue of lexical borrowing in basic vocabulary systematically across a sample of languages and comes up with a new and empirically tested list of stable lexical meanings. This has potential implications for future research into language classification. It also has far-reaching implications for a theory of language contact and bilingualism.

The volume presents the outcome of the Loanword Typology project, led by the two editors, Martin Haspelmath and Uri Tadmor, at the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig (and its affiliated field station in Jakarta). The contributors responded to an open call to join the project and were supported by MPI's technical team, who constructed a database to store the data, carry out calculations across the sample, and ultimately make the data available online (see below). The book follows in the footsteps of a collection that focuses on grammatical borrowing in a crosslinguistic sample of a similar size and similar diversity, also based on a questionnaire database (Matras & Sakel 2007). The two projects emerged at roughly the same time and partly in a shared discussion context, and there is even some overlap in the presence of languages and contributors (Michael Rießler on Kildin Saami, Viktor Elšík on Selice Romani, Zarina Estrada Fernández on Yaqui, Ewald Hekking and Dik Bakker on Otomi, Patience Epps on Hup, Jorge Gómez Rendón on Quichua, Uri Tadmor on Indonesian, Kristine Hildebrandt on Manange).

The collection has two parts. In Part 1, the two editors introduce the project methodology and database (1-34). MARTIN HASPELMATH then deals with concepts and issues in lexical borrowing (35-54), followed by a chapter by URI TADMOR on findings and results (55-75). Part 2 contains forty-one chapters on the borrowing behavior of...